The prevention of genomic instability – and cancer – can be attributed to a “complex mousetrap” mechanism, said Robert M. Brosh, Jr (Laboratory of Molecular Gerontology, NIH) in Nature.1 This not-so-subtle reference to Michael Behe’s irreducibly complex system described in Darwin’s Black Box even has a mousetrap illustration with the following caption: The BLM protein […]

Here’s another thing that distinguishes humans from animals: patience. Current Biology usually has a “Quick Guide” feature on some aspect of biology. In the latest issue, patience was the patient. First of all, what is it? Humans and other animals often make decisions that trade off present and future benefits. Should a monkey eat an […]

If monkeys do it, should it be outlawed? A story on Fox News claims that male monkeys pay for sex. The females make them pay up first: “The males use grooming as a form of currency to buy sex from the female,” a study by evolutionary biologists in Singapore concluded. And the point is? Animals […]

Humans are the only inhabitants of earth that are masters of true altruism: helping others with no thought of reward. Previous experiments had shown that chimpanzees lack this trait. Given an opportunity to help another chimp get a banana, they showed no pattern of charity. New experiments by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for […]